Initializing a Brisk Cluster on Amazon EC2 Using the DataStax AMI¶

Creating an EC2 Security Group for Brisk¶

1. In your Amazon EC2 Console Dashboard, select Security Group in the My Resources section.
2. Click Create Security Group and fill out a description and click Yes, Create.

3. Click Inbound and add a rule for the following ports.

4. After you are done adding the above port rules, click Apply Rule Changes. Your completed port rules should look something like this:

Launching the Brisk AMI¶

After you have created your security group, you are ready to launch an instance of Brisk using the DataStax AMI.

1. From your Amazon EC2 Console Dashboard, click Launch Instance. This launches the Request Instances Wizard.
2. On the Choose an AMI page, Select the Community AMIs tab. Search for the datastax-clustering-ami image, and click Select to launch it.
3. On the Instance Details page, enter the total number of nodes you want in your cluster in the Number of Instances field and select the Instance Type (Large is the smallest size recommended for a Brisk cluster).

Click Continue.

4. Under Advanced Instance Options add the following options to the User Data section depending on the type of Brisk cluster you want.

   For new Brisk clusters the available options are:

   Option	Description
   -n | –clustername <name>	Required. The name of the cluster.
   -s | –clustersize <num_nodes>	Required. The total number of nodes in the cluster.
   -d | –deployment <version>	Required. The version of the cluster: brisk.
   -v | –vanillanodes <num_nodes>	Optional. For mixed-workload clusters, the number of vanilla Cassandra nodes. Default is 0.
   -c | –cfsreplication <rf_num>	Optional. Sets the replication factor for the CFS keyspace. Default is 1.
   -e | –email <smtp>:<port>:<email>:<password>	Optional. Sends AMI installation log files to/from this email address.
   -o | –opscenter <user>:<pass>	Optional. Install OpsCenter free version on the first instance. Requires registration username and password.
   -p | –paidopscenter <user>:<pass>	Optional. Install OpsCenter paid version on the first instance. Requires registration username and password.

   The following additional options are available if adding nodes to an existing Brisk cluster. New nodes can be added to an established Brisk cluster one at a time.

   Option	Description
   -t | –token <token>	Assigns a token to the node being added.
   -z | –seeds <seed>,<seed>	The seed node(s) to contact in order to join a cluster. Seeds must be in the same region as the node being added.
   -w | –thisisvanilla 1	Using this option with 1 forces the joining node to be a vanilla Cassandra node.

   

Click Continue.

5. On the Tags page, give a name to your Brisk instance. This can be any name you like (For example: mixed-workload-brisk). Click Continue.
6. On the Create Key Pair page create a new key pair or select an existing key pair and click Continue. You will need this key (.pem file) to log in to your Brisk instance, so save it to a location on your local machine.
7. On the Configure Firewall page, select the Brisk security group you created earlier and click Continue.
8. On the Review page, review your cluster configuration and then click Launch.
9. Go to the My Instances page to see the status of your Brisk instance. Once a node has a status of running, you are able to connect to it.

Connecting to Your Brisk EC2 Instance¶

You can connect to your new Brisk EC2 instance using any SSH client (PuTTY, Terminal, etc.). To connect, you will need a private key (the .pem file you created earlier) and the public DNS name of a node. Connect as user ubuntu rather that root.

If this is the first time you are connecting, copy your private key file (<keyname>.pem) you downloaded earlier to your home directory, and change the permissions so it is not publicly viewable. For example:

chmod 400 briskkey.pem

1. From the My Instances page in your AWS EC2 Dashboard, select the node you want to connect to. Since all nodes are peers in Brisk, you can connect using any node in the cluster. However, the first node is typically the node running your Job Tracker and OpsCenter services (and is also the Cassandra seed node).

   

2. To get the public DNS name of a node, select Instance Actions > Connect

3. This will open a Connect Help - Secure Shell (SSH) page for the selected node. This page will have all of the information you need to connect via SSH. If you copy and paste the command line, change the connection user from root to ubuntu.

   

4. The AMI image configures your cluster and starts the Brisk Cassandra and Hadoop services. For next steps, see Getting Started with Brisk Hive, The Brisk/Hive Demo, or Getting Started with Brisk Pig.